Why you remember the hard nights better than the easy ones

Here is a small, unfair thing about how the first year gets stored.

You will remember the night you didn't know what to do. You will remember the drive, or the phone call, or the hour on the bathroom floor with the shower running. Those are filed in detail, permanently, and they come back unprompted years later.

The two hundred nights where everyone slept and nothing happened have left you almost nothing.

This is not a flaw in you

It's roughly what memory is for. Effort and surprise get kept; repetition gets compressed. A night that required nothing of you had nothing to attach itself to, so it merged with every other night like it.

Which is efficient, and completely fine — until you try to describe a whole year and find you're working from a highlights reel made entirely of the hard parts.

"If you go by what I remember, that year was awful. It genuinely wasn't. I just kept the wrong nights."

The version of the year you end up telling

This matters more than it sounds, because the story hardens.

The account you give a few years on — to a friend, to your own child, to yourself when you're deciding whether to do it again — is built from what survived. And what survived is skewed, in a specific direction, by a mechanism that has nothing to do with what the year was actually like.

Parents of grown children say a version of this often: it was better than I remember it being. Which is a kind thing to hear and a slightly sad one, because by then it can't be checked.

The correction is small

You can't make yourself remember an uneventful night. But you can leave evidence that it happened.

• One line on an ordinary evening — what you did, who fell asleep where
• The good weeks, marked as good, even though nothing happened in them
• The thing that made you laugh that day, however small
• The nights that were easy, which is the entry nobody thinks to write

That last one is the whole point. Nobody writes down "she went down at seven and slept," because at the time it feels like the absence of news. It is the single most under-recorded fact of early parenthood, and the one that most changes the shape of the year when you read it back.

What it's really for

Not accuracy for its own sake. It's that in about four years, someone in your house is going to ask what they were like as a baby.

And the honest answer shouldn't be assembled only from the nights that were hard enough to remember. It should include the Tuesday in November when nothing happened at all, and everyone slept, and you watched half a film.

That night existed. It just needs someone to have written one line about it.